🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Charles I

Monarchs · Stuart

Charles I

1600–1649

House of Stuart — the Personal Rule and the Civil Wars

In office: 1625–1649

Charles I believed he answered to God alone, ruled for eleven years without calling a parliament, and raised money by prerogative levies that the courts barely upheld. War with his Scottish subjects forced him to recall parliament in 1640; within two years the country was at war with itself. Defeated twice, tried by a court whose jurisdiction he refused to recognise, he was beheaded outside his father's Banqueting House in January 1649 and England became a republic for eleven years.

How to spot them

  • ▸The Personal Rule or Eleven Years' Tyranny, 1629–1640; Ship Money; Star Chamber
  • ▸Van Dyck portraits, the Gonzaga collection, the Rubens ceiling at Whitehall — the great royal connoisseur
  • ▸Small, shy, with a stammer; Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford as his ministers
  • ▸The only English king tried and executed by his own subjects; the Church of England keeps 30 January as his feast day

In the reign

Parliament forces the king to accept a statement of subjects' liberties against forced loans and arbitrary imprisonment (1628)

The Petition of Right, driven through by Sir Edward Coke

Eleven years of government without a single session of parliament (1629–1640)

The Personal Rule, ended by the Bishops' Wars with Scotland

A naval levy extended to inland counties, challenged in court by a Buckinghamshire squire (1637)

Ship Money and the trial of John Hampden, lost by only seven votes to five

A king enters the Commons chamber to arrest five members and finds that the birds have flown (1642)

5 January 1642; no sovereign has entered the Commons chamber since

The royal standard raised at Nottingham on a windy August evening (1642)

22 August 1642, the conventional opening of the First Civil War

The New Model Army destroys the royalist field army in Northamptonshire (1645)

The Battle of Naseby, 14 June 1645

A king beheaded on a scaffold outside a Whitehall banqueting hall on a freezing January morning (1649)

30 January 1649; he wore two shirts so that shivering should not be mistaken for fear

A new prayer book imposed on Scotland sets off a riot in St Giles' Cathedral (1637)

Traditionally started by Jenny Geddes throwing a stool; it led to the National Covenant

Quick-fire facts

  • •Second son of James VI and I; he became heir when his elder brother Henry Frederick died of typhoid in 1612
  • •Married Henrietta Maria of France in 1625; their sons became Charles II and James II
  • •His favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated by John Felton at Portsmouth in 1628
  • •Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was executed in 1641 by Act of Attainder after Charles signed his death warrant; Archbishop William Laud followed in 1645
  • •Key battles of the First Civil War: Edgehill (1642), Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645)
  • •He surrendered to the Scots at Newark in 1646; they handed him over to Parliament in 1647
  • •He was tried before a High Court of Justice presided over by John Bradshaw; 59 commissioners signed the death warrant
  • •His last word on the scaffold was 'Remember'; he had said he went from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown
  • •Buried without a funeral service at St George's Chapel, Windsor, in the vault of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour
  • •The Interregnum followed: monarchy and the House of Lords abolished in 1649, a Commonwealth declared, and Oliver Cromwell Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death in 1658

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources